Almost every time a camera maker announces a new model, I spot a few comments that follow a familiar script: someone sees the price, winces, and declares the company “greedy.”

It’s not just cameras. The same charge gets thrown at smartphone makers, appliance manufacturers, and even app developers who choose to charge a subscription. I see it far more often today than I did ten years ago, and in most cases, I think it’s misguided.

Don’t get me wrong. I understand sticker shock, and I feel it too. My colleague Richard Butler has done a great job explaining why your sense of camera prices might be out of date and why launch prices always seem high. Even with that perspective, though, we still feel the sting of higher prices. But a price that makes us cringe isn’t evidence of greed.

Mitchell Clark

Few people start a business to give something away, and camera companies aren’t charities. Like most companies, their goal is to make money, ideally as much as they can. That’s not wrong – it’s business.

Consider what that means. Camera makers want the highest price they can get today. But they wanted the same thing five years ago, and ten years before that. Their appetite for profit didn’t suddenly appear when prices went up, and that appetite always has to be tempered by what people are willing or able to pay. What has changed is what it costs to design and build a camera, and what we’re comparing new prices against.

In fact, it can be in our interest for camera companies to be profitable. Profit keeps them in business and pays for R&D. And let’s be honest – making cameras isn’t exactly a gold mine. Olympus sold off its camera business, and Samsung walked away from the market entirely, just as it was emerging as a more serious player.

Additionally, we always want more. I’ve never seen a camera launch where everyone said, “That’s it. This camera is perfect. It’s all we’ll ever need.” There’s always a “but.” But if it only had this one feature… The catch is that nobody agrees on what that feature is, so manufacturers have to keep developing. That requires money.

Am I suggesting that manufacturers never overreach? Of course not. We’ve all seen a company swing for the fences on price, sometimes to the point of being laughable. As Richard pointed out, launch prices in particular are essentially an opening bid, the most a company will ever get for a product, and they’re often optimistic.

However, consumers have power too: we can choose not to buy. If a camera sits on shelves, its price will come down. It almost always does. And if it sells out at full price, that tells us something too, even if we don’t like what it says.

Richard Butler

Is the system perfect? No. A handful of brands dominate the camera market, and once you’re invested in a system, switching is neither easy nor inexpensive. Companies do have real leverage over pricing, and it tends to show up where you’re locked in: proprietary batteries, pricey accessories, or even mounts that restrict the use of third-party lenses. Those are fair targets for criticism. But it’s a much more specific complaint than “this camera costs more than I want to pay, so the manufacturer must be greedy.” And when it comes to the cameras themselves, you have alternatives.

The next time a new camera’s price makes you cringe, try asking a different question. Instead of “why are they so greedy?”, ask “is this worth it to me?” If the answer is no, don’t buy it. It’s the most effective message a camera buyer can send.

That message has its limits, though. Holding off on buying might bring an optimistic launch price down, but it can’t make a camera cheaper to manufacture. If enough people decide the answer is yes, that price may simply be the new normal. If enough decide it’s no, we’re more likely to get a cheaper camera than the same camera for less.

I’m going to argue that Sigma’s 50-120mm F2.8 is one of the most interesting lenses this year. And not just because I’ve been asking for something like it, for years.

Different formats have different strengths and weaknesses, generally offering a different balance of size, price and image quality. But they can only live up to their full potential if they have lenses that let them deliver the size or price benefits they should be capable of.

For various reasons that have very little to do with the merits, or otherwise, of APS-C, most of the biggest camera makers have heavily focused their lens development on full-frame. This has left us in the odd situation where Canon, Nikon and Sony all make some quite nice APS-C bodies, but with lenses for them being distinctly few and far between.

But, as was the case in the DSLR era, third-party makers such as Sigma and Tamron have helped fill the gap. And, refreshingly, for the most part, the big camera makers have let them.

Finally, with the arrival of Sigma’s new 75-180mm equiv zoom, APS-C users across multiple systems can put together some pretty flexible kits that take full advantage of the size, price, image quality balance that the format should be able to provide.

Richard Butler

Incrementally, the choice of compact primes for APS-C has expanded, with autofocus options from the likes of Sigma, Tokina and Viltrox spanning a wide range of focal lengths. In terms of zooms there are a choice of wide-angles, and both Tamron and Sigma offer some interesting fast standard zooms

Even the camera makers themselves seem to recognize this need, with Nikon, Sony and Fujifilm all offering 16-50-ish F2.8 options. And, collectively, these options will cover a wide range of photography situations.

The addition of a modern approximation of a 70-200mm equiv for APS-C rounds out this lineup. It means you can keep your kit small and relatively affordable across an even wider range of photography. And it’s hard to convey just how small the Sigma 50-120mm is, until you see it in person.

Obviously, a 50-120mm F2.8 is not fully equivalent to an F2.8 75-180mm lens on full-frame (120/2.8 ≠ 180/2.8), but it lets you do the things that make a 70-200mm lens on full-frame so popular, while maintaining the size and price benefits you get in return for the image quality trade-off.

I loved the original APO Sigma 50-150mm F2.8 EX II HSM in the DSLR era because it was two-thirds the size of a 70-200 and two-thirds the price. It was a much easier to handle and less potentially intimidating lens than a 70-200, helping give me the confidence to shoot some of my first public portraits. And it was much easier to carry than the second-hand 70-200mm F2.8 I’d previously bought and that sat at home unless I was absolutely sure I’d need it.

Richard Butler

The new Sigma not only repeats that trick but improves on it. It’s so much smaller and lighter than an actual 70-200mm lens (even compared with Canon’s RF 70-200mm F4 with which it’s approximately equivalent) that it means I can keep it with me, even if I’m not anticipating needing it.

So, APS-C users, you have a choice: you can believe the bottom-line-benefitting talk of ‘upgrade paths,’ and saddle yourself with a heavy, expensive 105-300mm equiv lens (which can have their uses, but that aren’t necessarily the same as those of a 70-200mm), or you opt for the Sigma, and gain approximately 70-200 utility in a lens you can fit in a coat pocket. As an APS-C shooter, I know which makes sense to me.